An automated simple algorithm for realistic pore network extraction from micro-tomography images

Using 3-D scanned data to analyze and extract pore network plays a vital role in investigation of porous media׳s characteristics. In this paper, a new simple method is developed to detect pores and throats for analyzing the connectivity and permeability of the network. This automated method utilizes some of the common and well-known image processing functions which are widely accessible by researchers and this has led to an easy algorithm implementation. In this method, after polishing and quality control of images, using city-block distance function and watershed segmentation algorithm, pores and throats are detected and 3-D network is produced. This method can also be applied on 2-D images to extract some characteristics of the porous media such as pore and throat size distribution. The results of network extraction were verified by comparing the distribution of coordination number with a prevalent method in the literature.